PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Bill Harper (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 27 June 1972. MS-2-202 38.25.
Subject HeadingsIn response to a telephone request for information about the role of the cableship "Mackay-Bennett" in the Titanic rescue operation, T. H. Raddall sends Bill Harper of CBC Television (Halifax) four photographs and a newspaper clipping, relates stories he had heard from members of the "Mackay-Bennett" crew when he served on it in 1920, and offers leads on how to contact surviving "Mackay-Bennett" crew members.
|
June 27, 1972 Mr. Bill Harper,CBC Television, P.O. Box 3000, Halifax,N.S. Dear Bill: Further to our phone conversation yesterday, I send you, enclosed, the following:- (a) Photograph of Cableship "Mackay-Bennett". (b) Photograph of fore deck, Mackay-Bennett, showing some of the bodies recovered, each covered with canvas. (c) Small photograph, sepia, showing Harold W. Higginson, cable electrician, lifting canvas from two of the bodies. (d) Photograph of boat's crew from Mackay-Bennett, about to turn over a capsized lifeboat from Titanic, to see if any bodies are trapped beneath. (e) News clipping from Montreal Star, April 12, 1952, with picture and interview, W. J. Gray. I joined the ship's company of Mackay-Bennett in 1920, eight years after the Titanic affair. H.W.Higginson (from whom I got these photographs) and others of the 1912 crew were still in the ship, and told me about that gruesome business. All of the bodies recovered were wearing lifebelts, with their heads lolling for- ward as they bobbed in the sea. All had been killed by the cold, not by drowning, probably within an hour of dropping into the sea. Some years afterward I saw a reference to the Mackay-Bennett returning to port on May 1,1912, with 306 bodies on board. W. J. Gray, as he stated in the news interview, was chief op. at Cape Race when his friend Jack Phillips, chief op. of Titanic, sent out the distress call. I well remember him talking about it. CQ was the old general call to all ships or any ship when you didn't know her particular call letters -- roughly the equiv- alent of saying "Hey Mac!" to a stranger in the street. D was the prefix for any urgent message. Hence the combination CQD for a distress call. At the time of the Titanic affair the new special distress call SOS was coming into use, consequently Jack Phillips sent CQD, and later SOS, just to make sure . Soon after the Montreal Star interview, W.J.Gray and his wife left Canada to live in the Shetlands or Orkneys, where Gray was born. If he is living still, the Marconi Company of Canada, Montreal, would know, as presumably they paid him a pension. I had a card from Harold Higginson two or three years ago and we exchanged one or two letters. He was then living with a nephew on Long Island, NY., well on his eighties. I sent him (over) a card last Christmas, but got no reply. You may use these any way you like, Bill. Please be sure to send them back to me, as they are of value to my own memoirs. |
|
|